Alf Eaton has come up with a neat little de.icio.us hack. It
lists out the “speediest gatherers” for your del.icio.us page (last 100 items), based on the posting date of
items. I think this means it lists out the people who linked to the same thing as you,
but got there before you did. So the idea is that this list may help you find
people who are interested in the same things as you, but who are faster than you at
linking to them. Potentially then, this could save you the hassle of searching the Web
yourself for those nuggets of information. Just wait for the fast-movers in your
niche to link to them on delicious – kind of like a human version of the topic/tag/remix feeds I’ve
been talking about. Here is my list,
supplied by Alf:
My Gatherers (ricmac)
Quick Analysis
I think one bias to this system is that the more popular a link is, then the more
people will link to it, and thus it’ll likely generate a higher score on your list.
There’ll also be more people on your list, the more you link to popular items. On the
other hand, a high score could flag a person who shares the same niche interests
as you – which is what Alf’s script hopes to eek out. You’ll need to click through to
each person to find out.
The fact that only four people scored above 2 on my list (and one of them is me!)
indicates that I don’t generally link to popular items. Either that, or I’m very fast on
the uptake – which I know is not true!
Take a look at this list for a
delicious user called acidzebra, to see the difference.
acidzebra’s Gatherers
[…plus a heap of others with score of 2 or less]Postscript, 4/2/05: I lost the last two paragraphs of this post, because MT
couldn’t handle the length of it. But what I had written was that if you check out acidzebra’s delicious page, you’ll
see that it includes a lot of items with 100+ links (the deeper the red of the highlights, the
more popular an item is). So this I think accounts for the relative high scores on his Gatherers list, as well as its length.